Efficient spatio-temporal event processing with STARK

For Big Data processing, Apache Spark has been widely accepted. However, when dealing with events or any other spatio-temporal data sets, Spark becomes very inefficient as it does not include any spatial or temporal data types and operators. In this paper we demonstrate our STARK project that adds the required data types and operators, such as spatio-temporal filter and join with various predicates to Spark. Additionally, it includes k nearest neighbor search and a density based clustering operator for data analysis tasks as well as spatial partitioning and indexing techniques for efficient processing. During the demo, programs can be created on real world event data sets using STARK’s Scala API or our Pig Latin derivative Piglet in a web front end which also visualizes the results.